PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  He and Margaret moved on to Emporia when he bought a newspaper, the Kansas Greenbacker, to espouse cheap paper currency that could raise agricultural prices and ease the debts of farmers. The paper, he thought, might also advance his new political aspirations, but by the early 1880s a more settled eastern Kansas was finding the colonel’s irrepressible vigor less useful, and he could not win election to the legislature, so the Woods moved to Topeka, where he could edit the State Journal and remain close to the power shaping Kansas.

  That did not last long either, and, in 1886, he and Margaret went out to newly organized Stevens County in the southwest corner of the state, an area he had seen while traveling the Santa Fe Trail. He founded the town of Woodsdale, a self-honoring and, given the treelessness there, conveniently deceptive name. He began another newspaper, the Woodsdale Democrat (Sam, moving toward populism, left the Republican party as it came to represent money and privilege), and he entangled himself in a deadly fight for the county seat. Of the thirty-some such “wars” fought in Kansas, the one in bloody Stevens was the most violent, in no small way because Sam Wood lived there. To read about the American West is, so often, to discover how far fact stands from our myths of it, but the colonel in western Kansas fuses archetypes of character, scenery, and action into a story that dime novels were just then beginning to concoct and lay across all of the West.

  He was abducted and taken on what his enemies called a buffalo hunt into No Man’s Land—the Oklahoma panhandle where no government appeared to have jurisdiction—only to be rescued, as he had once rescued the old Free Stater Jacob Branson, and saved from execution. It must have seemed to the sixty-one-year-old crippled veteran that the days of border warfare, the kind of society he was most effective in, had come again and that he’d finally found the right place. With his old intrepidity and legal inventiveness, he began fighting a corrupt faction in Hugoton (named after the French novelist who so admired John Brown) that wanted the county seat, the proposed railroad, and the death of Woodsdale. But the Hugoton ring knew that even a graying and limping Sam Wood was still a formidable opponent, and the faction hired a gunman.

  XI

  CEDAR POINT

  From the Commonplace Book:

  Cedar Point

  The spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter and to possess no truth.

  —William James,

  “On a Certain Sense of Blindness in

  Human Beings” (1899)

  The Anthropic Principle . . . states that one of the constraints on the initial state of the cosmos was that it should be the kind of cosmos that could bring about through evolution observers of it that could confirm its existence and compel it to actualize itself by being observed.

  —Frederick Turner,

  “A Field Guide to the Synthetic

  Landscape” (1988)

  There always comes a moment, just before the moment of composition, when a subject seems stripped of all attraction, all charm, all atmosphere, even bare of significance. At last, losing all interest in it, you curse that sort of secret pact whereby you have committed yourself, and which makes it impossible for you to back out honorably.

  —André Gide,

  Journal of “The Counterfeiters” (1926)

  We must allow for the possibility that we can only understand something truly by knowing its future, its fruits, its consequences.

  —Frederick Turner,

  “A Field Guide to the Synthetic Landscape” (1988)

  The small country mill used to be one of the most common and important pivots of the American social and economic scene. . . . The road leading to the mill was always well traveled, as the miller was one of the most important members of the community. . . . Conversation and sociability were part of the mill’s stock-in-trade, and a strengthened sense of community a byproduct of its existence.

  —Douglass L. Brownstone,

  A Field Guide to America’s History, (1984)

  “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

  —Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1777)

  Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.

  —Jonathan Swift,

  Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

  The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

  —Thomas Jefferson,

  Letter to James Madison (1789)

  There are large tracts of land in America whose bounty is wasted because the plants which can be grown on them are not acceptable to our people. This is not because these plants are not in themselves useful and desirable, but because their valuable qualities are unknown.

  The people of any country must finally subsist on those articles of food which their own soil is best fitted to produce. New articles of diet must come into use, and all the resources of our own country must be adequately developed.

  —Melvin Gilmore,

  Uses of Plants by the Indians of the

  Missouri River Region (1919)

  We shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

  —Lynn White, Jr.,

  “The Historical Roots of

  Our Ecological Crisis” (1967)

  Christianity reserved spirit to men alone, and without spirits, plants and animals become mere matter, eligible for dissection into scientific law and economic advantage.

  —Peter Steinhart,

  “Ecological Saints” (1984)

  If agriculture is founded upon life, upon the use of energy to serve life, and if its primary purpose must therefore be to preserve the integrity of the life cycle, then agricultural technology must be bound under the rule of life. It must conform to natural processes and limits rather than to mechanical or economic models.

  Our agriculture, potentially capable of a large measure of independence, is absolutely dependent on petroleum, on the oil companies, and on the vagaries of politics.

  It is likely that we will have either to live within our limits . . . or not live at all. And certainly the knowledge of these limits and of how to live within them is the most comely and graceful knowledge that we have, the most healing and the most whole.

  The energy crisis is not a crisis of technology but of morality.

  —Wendell Berry,

  The Unsettling of America (1977)

  To raise protein in a vegetable form and then feed it to an animal results not in more but less protein for us, for the animal is an inefficient converter. A rough figure for the conversion of vegetable protein to animal protein by all livestock is 8:1. For cattle, the ratio is closer to 21:1. The twenty pounds of vegetable protein that do not become meat become mainly manure, which is not used to fertilize fields, but is washed down the river.

  —Lauren Brown,

  Grasses: An identification Guide (1979)

  Indirectly, the meat-eating quarter of humanity consumes nearly forty percent of the world’s grain—grain that fattens the livestock they eat. Meat production is behind a substantial share of the environmental strains induced by the present global agricultural system, from soil erosion to overpumping of underground water.

  —Alan Durning,

  “The Grim Payback of Greed” (1991)

  Fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery all appear convenient and useful in raising productivity. However, when viewed from a broader perspective, these kill the soil and crops, and destroy the natural productivity of the earth. “But after all,” we are often told, “along with its advantages, science also has its disadvantages.” Indeed, the two are inseparable; we cannot have one without the other. Science can produce no good without evil. It is effective only at the price of the destruction of nature. That is why, after man has maimed
and disfigured nature, science appears to give such striking results—when all it is doing is repairing the most extreme damage.

  Man is but an arrogant fool who vainly believes that he knows all of nature and can achieve anything he sets his mind to. Seeing neither the logic nor order inherent in nature, he has selfishly appropriated it to his own ends and destroyed it. The world today is in such a sad state because man has not felt compelled to reflect upon the dangers of his high-handed ways.

  —Masanobu Fukuoka,

  The Natural Way of Farming (1985)

  So much energy is consumed by farms and in the processing of foods that by the time the average American inserts the average calorie into the average mouth, some 9.8 calories of fossil fuels have been spent, meaning that we each eat the energy equivalent of more than thirteen barrels of oil every year.

  —Jon R. Luoma,

  “Prophet of the Praine” (1989)

  We have worked from the outside in, to alter our environment. Now we are starting to work from the inside out, and that changes everything. Everything except the driving force, the endless desire to master our planet.

  —Bill McKibben,

  The End of Nature (1989)

  People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

  —Stephen Jay Gould,

  Time magazine interview (1990)

  Since European settlement of North America, we’ve gone from native flora to mostly an exotic one, and now we are working our way back to native, environmentally adapted plants, with, perhaps, a few genetic manipulations thrown in. Sadly, it took us two hundred years to make this circle, and, two hundred years from now, we’ll probably still be battling the exotics that acclimated and became weeds while we were making the circuit.

  —Steven Clubine,

  Native Warm-Season Grass

  Newsletter (1990)

  All mankind is entering a new age, and world trends are beginning to obey new laws and logic.

  —Mikhail Gorbachev,

  A speech in California (1990)

  What is love?

  One name for it is knowledge.

  —Robert Penn Warren,

  Audubon: A Vision (1969)

  The very playful character of [the eastern wood rat], its cleanly habits, its mild, prominent, and bright eyes, together with its fine form and easy susceptibility of domestication, would render it a far more interesting pet than many others that the caprice of man has from time to time induced him to select.

  —John James Audubon,

  The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North

  America (1851)

  The ideal geographer should be able to do two things: he should be able to read his newspaper with understanding, and he should be able to take his country walk—or maybe his town walk—with interest.

  —H. C. Darby,

  Lecture at the University of Liverpool (1946)

  Kansas has had more newspapers established than any other state.

  —Leo E. Oliva,

  “Kansas: A Hard Land in the

  Heartland” (1988)

  The frontier everywhere, and nowhere more so than in Kansas, was a crucible which, if it often extracted the best from men, frequently revealed their baser metals as well. Or, in other words, the American West was not only a land of new beginnings, it was also one of bad endings.

  —Albert Castel,

  William Clarke Quantrill (1962)

  The aboriginal inhabitants of our state were called [Escansaques], “those who harass,” “those who stir up,” “disturbers,” and it seems that latter-day Kansans—those brothers—are keeping up the record by continually working at the same old game. Possibly they have absorbed from the atmosphere or from the soil some of the elements which give them the same characteristics. . . . Kansas will be Kansas no more when she lapses into a stupid pace and ceases to stir public sentiment along lines of activity.

  —George P. Morehouse,

  “History of the Kansa or Kaw Indians” (1906)

  [Consider] the redoubtable Sam Wood, who as soon as he plays out in one county moves into another, which he never fails to have under his control within a period of ninety days.

  —Editorial,

  Topeka Weekly Leader (1865)

  Those who cannot answer my arguments are at liberty to use their old arguments of abuse and vilification.

  In the number of rich men we now exceed the Old World. These men in many, in fact in most instances, have been made rich by class legislation by which the rich have been made richer and the poor poorer. Public officials and public trusts are today bought and sold with as little hesitancy as we used to buy hogs and sheep.

  —Samuel Newitt Wood,

  “Wood’s Manifesto: An Address” (1891)

  As a saint [Sam Wood] was bright, but as a sinner, miserable, dirty, and unreliable. . . . Upon the whole, his life was a queer admixture of joke and uncommon earnestness, of the lowest comedy and of the highest tragedy.

  —Obituary,

  Wichita Eagle (1891)

  It has been said that [Sam Wood] had more ardent friends and more violently inclined enemies than any other man who ever trod the soil of Kansas.

  —Cecil Howes,

  Kansas City Times (1946)

  The typical Kansas politician has long ceased to be a brave, colorful fellow who coins vivid phrases, makes symbolic gestures around which social movements can cohere and so exercises personal leadership.

  In most of the key areas of Kansas I’ve known, the economic man has become dominant almost to the point of excluding values and interests that differ from his. There is a tacit assumption among our ruling elite that the proper major aim of all education, scientific research, and cultural activity is the increase of private profits.

  [There is] the present growing national passion for the second-rate in our political life, the present insistence that everybody must think like the more reactionary of our businessmen on pain of being damned as a traitorous fellow.

  —Kenneth S. Davis,

  “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (1954)

  God made big men and little men, but Mr. Colt made eveners.

  —Anonymous,

  Western apothegm (c. 1880)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Cedar Point

  Talking with a man in Missouri one day, I mentioned I was headed out to Cedar Point, Kansas, and he, a Kansan, said, There aren’t any points in Kansas. If you understand the word to mean sharply peaked hills, I can think of a few there, although none in Chase County. For Cedar Point, Juniper Mound would be a more accurate name.

  Pennsylvanian O. H. Drinkwater came to Kansas and rode against the border ruffians and believed in John Brown and became the third settler in Chase. In 1857, while he was cutting eastern red cedars—technically, junipers—to build a cabin along a stream in the far west of the county, he suggested to a friend they call the creek Cedar. After sheltering whites during a couple of Indian scares, that first cabin, small and insubstantial as it was, became sportingly known as Fort Drinkwater. Later, when O. H. was postmaster, he canceled letters by writing “Cedar Point” across them, and, when he founded a town nearby, he transferred the name to it. I presume the “point” to be the small hill that provides a kind of protective back wall to the village, with its front gate opening onto the Cottonwood River just north.

  O. (for Orlo) H. went off as a captain with the Union army in 1863, but, a few months later, suffered sunstroke while working on a real garrison, Fort Gibson, in Indian Territory, and had to return to his place near the juncture of Cedar Creek with the Cottonwood.

  Even though he never quite recovered his health, O.H. in 1867 built a log dam across the deeply banked river here and set up a sawmill. Eight years later, joined by another Pennsylvanian, Peter Paul Schriver, he replaced both with rock structures and began grinding flour to ship over all t
he area. Of ten nineteenth-century mills once in the county, only Drinkwater and Schriver’s remains, not because it was the best but because the Pennsylvanians built it of stone. Today, one of the two finest in the state, it’s big and handsome in the plain prairie manner; it’s also, if not soon repaired, ready to collapse. It sits full of old milling machinery, pieces of the water turbine sunk in cellar mud.